Skin Swollen Below Cuticle

Someone had to say.

Photo: Hospital Waiting Room Shuchter

all think we know what the patient thinks, what the patient feels that we can anticipate their wishes.

And we do so in the belief that we are all patients get the disease and all alike.

The reality is that the behavior in front of a disease situation of the professionals linked to the health sector, with respect to the population with little or no linkage with industry is very different: we know the industry, we know the system and make better use of it ... are what a friend of mine defined it, with great success, "patients biased."

And in that belief no one dares to leave the comfort zone and ask what the patient really thinks.

remember a recent meeting with two specialists who struggled a service that is irrelevant and I can not reveal here ... the two agreed that they knew what the patient needed in a given disease: when asked if he had asked patients how they wished to provide the service, looked at me with surprise ... them they were not thought to ask: what took for known ... without asking.

And how do you ask? ... How many times have we seen in front of some type of guest satisfaction and we've answered what I really thought the topic that we wondered? Who can say that I always answer all questionnaires with what he really thinks? How many of us affects the environment in time to respond?

Think, for us, patients are often poorly tolerated guests in our centers, where in fact we are intruders in their lives.

How to approach the patient and tell us what you want ... which is different from what you want, and also different from what you need?

Who cares to measure the gap?

Because, we focus on what they want, but what they have been asked what they do not want?

livinglabización in processes and depending on the project are different approaches to the interrogation and detection of needs, but one of the most effective approaches is to make three rounds of questions, asking the same questions with a lapse of time between them, usually the first time what the answer is predictable, the second answer to the obvious, and the third, the true answer.

But this still does not answer the question of how to approach the patient.

and social networks can help, but we can not run the risk of increasing the digital divide, to create an elite based on social media excluding those who can not, do not know, can not access to knowledge and services they are entitled to parity of status.

must define a strategy approach, to be multichannel, multi-sectoral and multidisciplinary.

should be further reflection.